ALONE 1
by SevenAwkwardDaysLater
Summary: Three months after the events at Kreitech, Big Hero 6 is anything but "big" or "heroic" anymore. The members split up and take sides after a fight over the safety of their new responsibilities. Meanwhile, trouble stirs San Fransokyo from two seemingly unrelated sources. While Hiro unravels a coil of mystery, GoGo opens a different can of worms. Rated M for language, lemons, & gore.
1. Chapter 1

Firstly, Hiro thought that the fire had to have been some subsequent damage of Fred's jumping around going out of control – bouncing and burning being his peculiar specialty. Secondly, Hiro knew that Fred's idea of saving people meant just having fun – nothing mattered so long as it looked "awesome". So, with the combined knowledge of Fred's unusual methodology and the inexplicability as to how the fire started in the first place, Hiro was certain that Big Hero 6's split was doing more damage than any of them could have ever anticipated. Lucky for Hiro, it wasn't Fred's fault.

Lucky for the people inside, Honey was there before the fire department, tossing extinguishing bubbles that filled the crevices of the building with a carbon based chemical foam. Lucky for Honey, the foam didn't swallow the oxygen and suffocate the citizens inside along with the fire. Luck wouldn't do any good in the long term as far as their line of work went. Relying on luck is what gets people killed.

Hiro shook his head and lifted his visor to press his fingertips into the bridge of his nose. This all sounded like something Wasabi would say. Hell, it was something he _did_ say. Months ago.

"We got lucky?" Wasabi barked. "That's all you have to say?"

"Nobody got hurt, man," Fred shrugged with a smug grin, "that's all I'm saying."

"Luck won't always be on our side," Gogo interjected.

"We have to test things before we go out and do outrageous things," Honey nodded. "Experiment where it's safe to ensure whatever outrageous thing we do actually works, right?"

"We hardly get away with knowing how to use what we already have!" Wasabi exclaimed. "We shouldn't go out and try new things with such an unstable ground to build off of."

"Unstable?" Fred sounded more than just taken aback. He sounded hurt. "Who the hell do you think I am? Some nutcase in a suit?"

Wasabi stepped forward and pressed his face into Fred's, snarling, "That's exactly what I think you are."

"We have to seek new challenges," Gogo stepped between them and shoved the two apart, "and improve what we have by learning how to utilize it in every situation imaginable."

"But how can we advance if we remain developmentally docile?"

"By adding to a more solid knowledge base!"

"I don't care, dude, I'm here to have fun!"

"Fun will kill you and the people of San Fransokyo!"

Hiro sighed. It just went on like that for a long time. Lots of yelling. Taking sides. The project that he had created to apprehend the man who killed his brother inadvertently turned into the most successful and dysfunctional group of superheroes he'd ever seen. They worked well together in the field but it was always because they ended up separated in the middle of battle.

So the six decided to go out of their way and separate themselves from one another before they even entered the scene.

Hiro looked up at Baymax who stared blankly back down at him, silently scanning his neurotransmitter levels. Serotonin and dopamine had dropped in Hiro's body over the past two months. Something deeply troubling was affecting him and, this time, there were no cues to indicate what could possibly help alleviate his affliction. Hiro didn't give him a lot of commands anymore nor did he do fist bumps, something that Baymax enjoyed due both to the happiness it tended to bring Hiro and the mild static electric jolt contained in Hiro's body after every battle entering Baymax's metallic armor and tingling the silicone skin inside.

"Baymax," Hiro turned to him and crossed his arms over his chest, "pull up news footage about the fire. Isolate it to any mention about what possibly caused it."

"Scanning airwaves." Baymax stood, loading for but a minute before announcing, "Scanning complete."

His chest plate parted to reveal a bulletproof glass slate Hiro had put there to protect the robot's soft body from punctures in battle. Though thick, it allowed Hiro to see readouts and information without worrying about popping his automated friend. The screen lit up and displayed several news reports from the scene of the fire, just below them, reporters talking to the camera about the details of the victims and the situation of the blaze.

"Jinro Watanabe states that he has never experienced unexplained blackouts before nor do doctors say that he has any medical history that would allude to a sudden heart attack or stroke that might lead to his unconsciousness at the time of the fire, but detectives do state that, when the stove caught fire, Watanabe was out cold."

Hiro furrowed his brow and shook his head. "Next."

The screen displayed a young man, probably late twenties, who was covered in soot and sitting on the back of a firetruck. A microphone hovered in front of his face. His breath was ragged. "I was talking on the phone with my older sister and, just, bam! Suddenly, I was being dragged out of the apartment by these guys. I don't even know what happened…"

Hiro pressed his fingertips to his lips. Baymax identified it as a pensive expression. Automatically, scans were done on the audio track of Watanabe's voice, searching for unusual fluctuations or hiccups that might allude to any amount of emotions experienced at the time of him saying anything to the camera. "Scans indicate that mister Watanabe isn't lying about what happened to him."

Hiro turned around and looked over the edge at the smoldered building beneath the floating air turbine they stood upon. He huffed and pulled his helmet off of his head, pushing hair from his eyes and tucking the helmet under an arm.

This was the seventh time in the last two weeks that something unusual like this had happened. It started with a house flooding over when someone drowned in the bath. It moved on to car crashes and, now, building fires. None of the events seemed to have anything in common except for the odd and inexplicable narcolepsy that appeared to come over someone when it happened. Above all, it wasn't comforting. If his brother was here, he'd find the angle behind the fire. Everything just didn't add up correctly in Hiro's head. There had to be a logical explanation. People didn't just pass out.

He looked at his cell phone and frowned. Still nothing from anyone. Not Fred begging for Hiro to understand that it wasn't him this time. Not Wasabi demanding to know where Fred was. Not Honey asking about information from Baymax. Not even a "wtf" text from GoGo. He missed his friends. Each of their talents combined made them Big Hero 6, together.

Apart, Hiro felt like they were just…alone.


	2. Chapter 2

GoGo watched the video closely. Flames shot out the windows of the building for a while before Honey came in, metal heels screeching against the pavement to stop her sprint. The camera got shake-y for a bit before refocusing on Honey's latest invention, a chrome plated rifle of some sort with a bulb of what appeared to be plexiglass as the stock. Inside the bulb, GoGo could see a hose stretching between the gun and her bubble producing bag. Pale blue bubbles popped out of the bag and filled the bulb and awaited to be fired from the rifle in Honey's hands. The bubbles fired with the pull of a handle and replaced the flames in each window with white foam that poured onto the streets.

The clip flicked to a reporter sitting at a desk and staring intently into the camera, furrowing her brow and reading her cue cards in total seriousness.

"San Fransokyo has been saved several times by the members of the team that referred to themselves after the Kreitech University incident as 'Big Hero Six'. They come from nowhere spouting technology we can only imagine and rescue citizens in danger. But their recent successes call into question the reality that poses a threat to you and your family." A new image replaced Honey's beside the anchorwoman's head. It was a still from a reporter's camera that captured their spectacle at Kreitech three months ago. "Tonight, channel seventeen will discuss the mysteries behind the vigilantes that fight against technological terrorism using technologies of their own in Eleven/Eleven's 'With Fire', at eleven. The time is nine fifteen and today, a new shipment of…"

The reporter babbled on about some other subject, obviously less stern than the previous topic based on her dramatic and quick vocal transgression. Surely, something Fred did was the cause of the fire and, just as surely, Honey's success didn't make up for it. The public didn't like what they were seeing. They were scaring more people than they were saving and it needed to change. Fast. If Fred started that fire and Honey put it out, it'll look suspicious and god knew what was being talked about tonight at eleven on Eleven/Eleven.

"Shit," GoGo cursed under her breath as she closed the video app on her phone and opened an empty text and addressed it to Wasabi. Her fingers started into their motions but hovered over the keys for a moment as she hesitated. A moment passed and she looked up from her screen. She was certain something had happened just then. Something in the corner of her eye.

She hated that her attentiveness wasn't good enough to pick up on things like that. Sometimes, Hiro and Baymax would fly over the city and she wouldn't notice until he was further ahead on the horizon. How she didn't see their shadows on the city floor was unthinkable but it needed to be improved upon. Of course, now, she was starting to overcompensate and think something was there when, in reality, it was nothing at all. She returned her stare to her phone and started to blow a bubble from her gum. She pinched the gum and brought the bubble past her lips and cradled it in her teeth.

_Pop_.

Then she saw it.

Out of the corner of her eye, GoGo saw a flash of soft grey, springing from the alleyway she stood across the street from. Instinctively, she flinched in reaction, jerking her whole body away from the road where slippery tendrils swiped widely at the electromagnet blades on her feet. The people on the sidewalk in the street panicked in different ways, some screaming at the sudden fright, others simply darting away from the strange and unidentifiable thing. The tendrils started retreating to the darkness of the alleyway again and GoGo swore at herself for doubting her senses.

She bent at her knees and pressed her wrists against the insides of her golden yellow boots, the magnetic wristbands she wore pulled off the detachable metal cuffs. A flick of her wrists and the cuffs locked onto her forearms. She threw her arms over her shoulders and into her backpack, feeling the magnetic catch of her discs click onto her gauntlets and pulled herself to a fighting stance mere moments before the tendrils launched out of the alleyway again, striking higher this time.

GoGo leaped forward, curling her body under the tendrils and springing up on the other side of the street with a spin. She used her momentum to toss a discus at the form and watched it plow through the flesh with ease. Scratching to a halt on the sidewalk, GoGo took a longer look at the peculiar creature. It oozed a translucent fluid that encased its entire grey body, consisting of what had to be a million individual wormlike organisms woven together and moving as one. The end of the worm sack that struck before had been hit by the disc, severing the tendrils there. GoGo's eyes widened as the cut parts of the creature didn't die but, rather, wriggled on the ground on their own.

The fleshy cords sprung for GoGo's legs and she bounded up to the building beside her, digging one foot's disc blade into the brick and stepping up with the other until her altitude was acceptable. She pushed away from the wall and took her second disc from her arm, throwing it expertly through the creature's stretched length. The tendrils tore again, like a plasma knife through butter. But the sliced worms redirected upwards and straight for GoGo's boot. She coiled and retreated her limbs away from her enemy, rolling in time to land on her feet back on the other side of the street.

She gripped the first disc she threw, lodged in the concrete of an apartment building, and yanked it free. The creature reared and morphed itself with the second, severed half that wriggled chaotically, forming a much shorter but much thicker weave of worms. GoGo pressed the disc blade against the wall and spun herself where she stood, forcing the disc on her arm to spin as well and become a toothless saw of her golden fury. With one swift motion, she raised a leg and thrust away from the wall, spinning like a low torpedo through the air towards the worms, spinning blade extended to slice yet again.

The worm caught and encompassed the blade, smaller worms flying out of the clear slime bag that contained them until the blade stopped rotating and GoGo's attack was rendered futile. She tugged her arm out of the gauntlet and fell back onto the curb. The creature quickly gathered itself and slithered into the alleyway from whence it came. GoGo snarled and ran forward, grabbing the disc it left on the floor, covered in mucus, and threw it into the alley.

A direct hit sent the worms into a writhing panic, dropping the disc inside it and cowering up the walls away from her and out of the alley. She spat her gum at one of the worms that attempted to escape past her as she stepped into the alleyway to get her weapons back. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion as she picked up the first blade.

This wasn't a dangerous alleyway. She and Fred always came down around this place to meet their weed dealer. GoGo knew the alley like the back of her hand and, yet, now she was anything but easy about it. Some strange alien thing had crawled out of it to attack her without explanation and, just as suddenly as it appeared, it briskly made its way out of the scene. She chewed her cheek with her molars as she reached down for the second disc blade and looked up to an ungodly sight.

Fred's suit laid in a pile of trash, like the guy was just relaxing on a beanbag chair at his massive estate. Except, GoGo knew that wasn't the case. The suit was damaged. A lot. Scorch marks covered its hands and melted the plastic brim where the monster's head met the chest. The head, however, was gone. It appeared to be cut off from the rest of the body, in a near perfect and clean cut, save for the gallon or two of mucus that covered it. The suit's stench was putrid.

GoGo gulped and peered into the suit only to immediately regret even thinking about it. She pressed a hand against the wall of the alley and held herself up for a moment before letting her disc blades roll from under her weight and put her on her knees across from the trashed suit. She could feel vomit boil up into her throat, threatening to pour over if she dared look again. Her breaths were raspy, taken from her by the sight she unmistakably saw.

The suit wasn't empty.

She bowed her chin to her neck and shut her eyes for a long time before fleeing the alleyway on her blades, texting as she skated.

To: WASABI

Subject: The Fire

IT WASN'T FRED


	3. Chapter 3

Wasabi pulled his straw to his lips clumsily as he read GoGo's text to himself, slurping iced coffee with cream while some teenagers at the table next to him raved about what they found on social media sites. He squinted at the words and looked up to the news station displayed on the miniature television in the corner of the café. Hiro had sent a text earlier that he wanted to meet up at Cass's café and here he was, watching the only news station that wasn't talking about the apartment fire on the south Minami mile, waiting for a friend who hadn't even shown up, reading a text from the only person he was certain to be on his side about the three month old fight state bluntly, yet cryptically, that his suspicions were wrong.

He flipped his phone so that it was face down on the table and leaned back in the chair, resting his thumb on his chin and his index finger on his temple. He trusted GoGo's judgement but there was so little evidence that he, or even the police, knew of about the fire's unusual origins, he felt entitled to a sense of disbelief. Fred had nearly killed the people he was supposed to be saving before. In that monster suit, sometimes Wasabi wondered if Fred had the capacity to remember he wasn't actually a monster from one of his action films.

Looking up, Wasabi saw Hiro come through the front doors with Baymax deactivated and stuffed inside a massive red suitcase that was almost too big for the kid to carry. Low profile. At least, as low profile as Baymax could be made to be. Wasabi nodded to him and Hiro took his seat, hoisting the suitcase up and onto the table with a weight that almost tipped Wasabi's drink.

"It's not often you want to see us anymore," Wasabi mentioned, taking his coffee off the table and holding it in his palm as if it were a saucer. As odd as he looked, Hiro knew it was to prevent any tragic loss of Aunt Cass's sweet nectar of coffee.

"I didn't want to pick sides," Hiro shrugged, drumming his fingers once on the suitcase. "It was too difficult for me to do what you guys were doing. I never had friends much before you all and…"

Wasabi looked down at the table in silence.

"…I don't know," Hiro sighed. "I didn't want to have to lose any of you and I thought I could be friends with all of you still, even if you don't want to be friends with each other."

"It wasn't that I didn't want to be friends, Hiro," Wasabi picked up his phone and started texting GoGo to meet them. "I care about Fred. I worry about him a lot. He's spontaneous and goofy and, yeah, that's fun and good when he's making jokes but, in the end, he's going to get himself or other people killed. When we started this thing, we didn't think about the amount of responsibility it brought along with it. We weren't put in the position we were just to be taxed with finding the Phantom. I know that was the original intent but we are meant for greater things."

Hiro chewed his lip and looked at Cass at the counter, too busy serving customers that lined out the front door to notice her nephew had come in. He turned his gaze to Baymax in sleep mode in the portable case that Tadashi had built for him before…

"I know the fire means a lot to you, Hiro," Wasabi said somberly. "It probably hits really close to home for you."

"Nobody was killed," Hiro said, his mind flashing back to images of that fateful day.

There was a long pause before Hiro started talking again.

He took a deep breath and shut his eyes. "Nobody was killed this time but I worry about what will happen if..."

"It's not Fred," Wasabi shook his head. "Or, at least, GoGo says so."

"You're still with her, then?" Hiro smiled.

Wasabi started to turn pink under his dark skin, eyes widening. He looked to the door, worried that the woman in question might come in at any moment while talking about her. That superstition of 'speak of the devil and he will appear' swept over Wasabi in a wink and he gulped. It wasn't like they weren't together. After all, they saw each other every single day while out doing their heroic responsible thing. It's just…

"Well…" Wasabi fumbled, "…technically?"

"No," came a voice from the door and Hiro looked over his shoulder. GoGo was wearing her boots with the disc roller blades tucked away in a bag strung tight to her back. She held a hand on her hip and narrowed her eyes at Wasabi for a long moment before stepping in and taking a chair. She spun the chair one hundred and eighty degrees and sat leaning against the chair's back. She blew a bubble and popped it in her teeth. "No, we're not together."

"Why don't you think Fred was the cause of the fire?" Wasabi asked, simultaneously getting an answer out of her confidence on the subject as well as trying to avoid her confidence on the subject previous. The last thing he wanted to talk about was how he asked her to date with him once Kreitech was over and their lives were narrowly lost. One of those moments of exhilaration after a near death experience brought him to decide not to be single anymore and the first girl there was GoGo. After about two months together, GoGo broke up with him for being too stingy and slow in the relationship. She wanted more exhilaration. Wasabi only had it that once.

GoGo looked to Hiro and Wasabi before staring straight ahead to focus on how she felt about the whole thing. Fred was the reason for the split of Big Hero 6 but, at the same time, she sided with Wasabi on the matter. If she had done what Hiro did, and stayed out of it, Big Hero 6 might still be a tightly knit group and Fred could be…

"_Fred's dead_."


	4. Chapter 4

"This isn't a good idea, GoGo," Hiro assured as he stood outside the alleyway. The sidewalk was sticky with residue that glinted in the moonlight when he lifted his feet. The only noise aside from their hushed arguing on the long abandoned street was GoGo's bubble gum popping. Wasabi did everything within his power to avoid making contact with the parts of the ground that GoGo explained what happened. Call it paranoia. He called it safety.

"Would you rather go look yourself?" GoGo asked, staring straight ahead and into the pitch black void of light that swallowed the gap between the buildings.

Hiro clenched his fingers into his palms, digging nails into skin as he contemplated the idea. If something were to happen in there, Baymax might not be as efficient without him commanding him directly. Protocol could only work so well with fighting. Based on what GoGo described, Baymax had never encountered something quite like it. His computing might haywire with the combined programming for attack as well as the programming for nursing the deathless creature to health.

But he certainly didn't want to go in there and see what GoGo claimed to be true.

He took a deep breath and turned to her. "Slap me in the face."

GoGo's brow furrowed and she looked down at the fourteen year old. She couldn't hit Tadashi's brother. That would be like hitting Tadashi. Or like hitting his brother. Or like hitting Hiro. She couldn't do any of those things, not even now. To maintain her cool and bitchy front, GoGo turned immediately to Wasabi and slapped him across the nose, evoking a squealed 'ow' from the man.

The lights on Hiro's suitcase glowed to life and the box unfolded and expanded at certain points to reveal Baymax in his armored status. Hiro had been working on the portable armor get-up for a long time. Lots of configuring the charging station to house metal sheets thin enough to be concealed in a large suitcase but thick enough to protect the artificially soft skin underneath.

Baymax stood tall and awkwardly, raising a hand and rotating it in a single circle before stating aloud, "Hello! I am Baymax. I was alerted to your distress when you said-," it was here that GoGo and Hiro had to muffle their laughter as Wasabi's girlish screech replayed from Baymax's speakers. "How may I be of service?"

"Baymax," Hiro coughed into seriousness at the situation's depth, commanding, "there might be a sick patient in that alleyway. I want you to scan him and come back with whatever information you acquire."

Baymax's emotionless face looked to the alleyway and his body rotated underneath it, marching forward with wide, loud strides. Hiro bit his lip as he heard the all too familiar sound of scanning being done in the dark. Wasabi started shaking, attempting to remember what his last words to Fred were. If Fred was dead, he'd feel guilty for everything he'd ever said or done to him. GoGo was pinching her elbows with her hands, arms crossed over her chest to keep tight to her what she felt about losing a longtime friend like Fred.

Baymax slowly returned, long strides punctuated by equally long pauses as he calculated each movement to avoid scraping his body or his armor on the walls of the buildings beside him. The wait increased the anticipation. Baymax stood at the threshold of the alleyway and looked down at Hiro.

"The patient in the alleyway was unresponsive. Scans indicated a zero beats per minute heart rate and a brainwave scan displays unrecognized neural activity," Baymax concluded.

Hiro looked up to GoGo. She wasn't even trying to appear cool and aloof anymore. She was simply devastated. Her head hung low and her eyes were shut tight as her face bared a grimace of remorse. Hiro gulped and looked at Baymax.

"Baymax…" He inhaled sharply. "…display scan photo documents."

Baymax's screen revealed itself from within his chest, bright in contrast with the night and certainly visible from the windows across the street. Night vision enhanced images showed Wasabi and Hiro something of what GoGo had seen earlier, a mangled monster suit with no head on it, the seams where the head had to have been attached completely melted together. The sticky residue from the floor coated the clean cut in the suit's design, reflecting some of the light off of the street. It mixed with the darker fluid inside the suit, keeping it moist enough to identify even through the monochromic photo.

"There's just…" GoGo shuddered, "…no _fucking_ head…"

Wasabi wretched, leaned over and began to vomit onto the street, bent nearly clear in half and holding his stomach. Hiro's heart pounded in his chest. Even when his brother died, he'd never seen anything like this. Nothing so…disturbing.

"I'm satisfied with my care," Hiro muttered and Baymax started to deflate, his metal sheet plates sliding against one another and locking into place where they belonged within the confines of Tadashi's former suitcase. There was a still and stagnant silence among them, broken only by littered paper dragged against the concrete sidewalk by the wind. Finally, Hiro turned away from the alley.

"I don't care what caused that fire," Hiro looked down the road. The city went on forever it seemed, lined with buildings full of people with cars and jobs and families. And lives. Lives that Hiro had, though unspoken, promised to himself he would protect. Fred was a person. With a car. With a family. With a life. "I want to know what all this is about and stop it before it becomes something too big to handle. One life is too many and god knows what else its done out there."

Wasabi spat the last of the nasty taste from his mouth. "Whatever _it_ is."

"Wasabi," Hiro pointed at him, "I want you to find Honey. If she can stop a raging fire, she might be able to stop this thing. We can use her chemical knowledge to fight it."

"I'll check around the campus first," Wasabi nodded. "Last I saw her, she was trying to utilize electromagnetized electrons to create a special kind of covalent molecular bond. Or something like that. It's hard to tell what she's talking about sometimes. I'll find her."

GoGo stepped forward and jabbed a thumb into her chest. "I'm going after that thing."

"Absolutely not," Hiro crossed his arms.

She narrowed her eyes at him but his stare was unwavering.

"You narrowly escaped that thing last time, you said so yourself," he annotated. "You research any scientific reports that mention anything about worms or mutilated subjects. The more we know going into battle with this, the better. I'll go after it and supply myself the aerial advantage."

"I tried that," GoGo shook her head, "it nearly gobbled me up. Cutting through its collective body was the best way to stun it, even if only temporarily and the sharpest thing on Baymax is his wings. There goes the aerial advantage all together."

Wasabi leered at the slime trails leading into the alleyway and gulped.

"In that case, I'll go after it," he announced. "My plasma blades are attached to me so they're not getting stolen and I can set up some traps using the string plasma slicers back at the Geek Lab."

Hiro and GoGo glanced at Wasabi and nodded to each other.

"I'll find Honey, then," GoGo confirmed.

Hiro patted Baymax's casing. "I'll do some homework."

Wasabi clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together.

"Now we're acting like a hero squad."


	5. Chapter 5

Hiro darted home and was delighted to see the house lights above the café extinguished. It meant that Aunt Cass was still asleep and he could get in unnoticed. He stepped up to the door of the café and carefully unlocked it with his key, making sure not to cause too much noise at the risk of waking Cass and having to face his truancy head-on. The door opened smoothly and quietly, allowing him to slip in without so much as a squeak from neither the door nor his sneakers. There was no way he'd get in trouble this time around.

It did, however, mean that he lost a few good boy points with her for not coming downstairs for dinner. He could earn them back, though, if he was actually a good nephew and not some vigilante chasing down a worm trail using a giant nurse android made into a high flying heroic spectacle. Come to think of it, Hiro couldn't justify one reason that he'd earn good boy points back for stuff like this except for Cass's genuine generosity.

"It's almost one in the morning," Cass spoke from behind Hiro and forced him to freeze in his place. She was sitting behind the counter of the café, eating her own pastries to pass the time when Hiro reached the stairs and entered her field of view while remaining clear out of his own. Hiro winced at himself. He definitely wasn't going to earn back those good boy points.

"Aunt Cass, I was just…" Hiro took a breath and held it for a moment. Just what? Investigating his friend's death? Exploring the world of gooey slithery things?

Cass pinched the bridge of her nose. Hiro noticed that he tended to do it, too. He probably picked it up from Cass. "Hiro, if we have to deal with the bot fighting thing again…"

"No, Aunt Cass," he shook his head. "No, I'm out of bot fighting for good."

"Then where were you all this time?" Cass stood and knelt to Hiro's height, her eyes pleading in the darkness.

Hiro blinked a few times while he thought of an answer that wouldn't erupt in more deduction of his standing with his aunt. "I was with GoGo."

Cass bit her lip and swallowed. GoGo was mature. Protective. If he was with her, he was safe. But that didn't always hold true, what with everything she'd seen on the news about supposed heroes and the freakish events they seemed to bring with them. Kreitech was devastation with a luckily low number of casualties. The events of the past month, however, have killed people where she, like many other San Fransokyans, believed the professionals could do a better job. The police department, the fire department, and, at times, the hospital were all being bypassed in a sprint to be heroic. Luck wasn't heroic to Cass, though.

"Next time," Cass sighed as she crossed her arms, "at least have her walk you home. It's dark and dangerous this late. I don't want you getting hurt."

"I know," Hiro nodded.

Cass started up the stairs ahead of him and stopped mid-stride, looking down to him while gripping onto the handrail, as if she'd seen the ghosts of her past dance in front of her eyes. Of course, the realization that the wonderful work that Tadashi did at being Hiro's parent would no longer be a crutch upon which she knew she could rely. Tadashi was gone. He'd been gone for a little while but it still never quite settled with her.

"You're my only family left," Cass whispered.

Hiro's brows pinched at the center of his forehead, a pit growing in his chest. He knew when Cass was about to cry. It was something in her voice, a break of pace and breath where her words barely escaped the tip of her tongue and fluttered lifelessly down to the floorboards. Hiro took the bottom step of the stairs and wrapped his arms around her waist to pull her into a soft hug of reassurance. The kind of hug she'd give him. She deserved to feel that kind of comfort.

"I know…"

Wasabi curled his lips back into a grimace as he swabbed samples of the fluid nastiness that coated the sidewalk enough to freeze over in winter. The night was starting to turn into early morning and people started roaming towards their places of business, opening for the day or stopping to get breakfast beforehand. The benefit of the morning, however, was that stepping deeper into the alleyway to remain out of sight and inconspicuous met more light entering the dark crevice which was a small comfort for the man.

He palmed a phial and placed the cotton swab inside, sure to coat the inside of the glass with the transparent goo. Once he was satisfied with the sample – and thoroughly disgusted with the scene – he corked the tube with a rubber stopper and stood, brushing his knees free of dust on the way up. As light started to enter the alleyway, more of the slime was visible than from earlier that night. Based on the agility that the creature possessed in GoGo's description of her fight, Wasabi thought it was much smaller than the slime trail revealed to him, now.

The goo's reflection of light glimmered on the walls from the ground to the rooftops of the buildings around him. GoGo had said that it seemed to just keep moving, no matter how much she cut into it. There were tons of animals that did that kind of thing. Lizards could remove and regrow whole limbs with ease, as could an octopus. However, in his admittedly limited experience with scale-y/slime-y creatures that can regenerate parts of their body, Wasabi knew that those severed limbs couldn't move on their own once they were separated. Something made the creature that GoGo fought different from them.

_Worms_.

Wasabi shivered and shuddered as the word, alone, brought slippery images of filthy dirt riddled with writhing red specimens of pure grossness. They were a whole different kind of disturbing thing spawned by the animal planet. The stuff of nightmares. But GoGo called them worms. What makes them any different, for say, from other worms in the fact that they could be cut in half and both sides would wiggle and creep him out?

But worms capable of killing someone like this?

Wasabi looked to the concrete between his feet for a long while. What were the last words he said to Fred? There were so many words thrown around in that final fight of theirs. So many insults. It made Wasabi sick with himself for not being a better friend and trying to help  
>Fred instead of simply giving up and leaving. There was so little that had to be done to prevent this from happening to him. Anything. Even a text of apology could have spurned on a totally different universe where Fred was here and well and… alive.<p>

He turned around and looked at the body. It hadn't moved since they looked at it hours ago and, in the new light, Wasabi saw much more than he saw on Baymax's night vision enhanced scans. GoGo probably saw it, too. All the blood that showed up as just dark spots on the pictures had dried into their places in Fred's suit. Wasabi looked at where the head was supposed to be. A maroon mess of flesh stretched out from Fred's thin neck. Wasabi actually wished there was something there. A head with a face with eyes to close.

Looking at the suit, it had taken some serious damage during the fight. The arms were heavily scorched and the claw like fingers were melted shut. Color started to fade on the suit's torso and the colorful paint elsewhere was cracking. God knew how long he had been there before GoGo found him. Seconds? Days? A month? Wasabi reached for the suit's torso and jumped backwards with a squeal as a static shock jolted his fingertips. He had heard somewhere that bodies store up energy like that, since there is no way for it to be released. Looking at his fingers, Wasabi felt nothing but regret.

"I'm sorry, Freddie."

Wasabi took a deep breath and looked up to the rooftops again, rolling up his sleeves and revealing the green arm bucklers that housed his plasma induced beam blades. He crossed his arms and rested his hand on the release levers that were tight to his wrists. With a fast motion, Wasabi threw the switches and the green light of the blades illuminated the alleyway, stretching outward from his hands and arching together at a point.

He took a step towards one wall and jumped up to it, stabbing the blade into the wall with a hum and pushing away from the wall to plant the other blade in the building opposite of him. Like this, he jumped from wall to wall to wall until he was at the terrace of one of the buildings. The light started to shine into his eyes and he carefully clicked the visor attached to his headband down to cut the glare.

As he climbed onto the roof of the structure, Wasabi's eyes widened in awe and fright. The goo trail that lead from the street didn't just climb up the walls with the creature, but had to have followed it as it moved from rooftop to rooftop, splattering its glistening translucence onto every building all the way out to the river and, if Wasabi's eyes didn't play tricks on him, onto the San Fransokyo bridge.

Wasabi flicked the blades off with his thighs and reached for his phone, quickly searching the addresses of the stranger events that occurred in the last two weeks. The peculiar drowning on Hanada. The car crashes that plagued Kumiko street and Viro circle. The fire on south Minami. Everything was within sight of the rooftop Wasabi stood upon and each one had sticky shimmers radiating the morning sun's glow.

He jumped when his phone started to vibrate in his hands and GoGo's face appeared on the screen. He tapped the little green call symbol and hold the phone up to his ear.

"GoGo?" Wasabi heaved a deep breath. "We have a much bigger problem than we thought."


	6. Chapter 6

"I know, I know," GoGo explained, "I'm trying to find Honey at the nerd lab. If I don't catch her right away, I'm sure I'll run into her there in a few hours."

"GoGo," Wasabi's voice shivered. "GoGo, it's been everywhere. I can see every single hotspot from the last two weeks from this building and they all have that…slime on them."

"I'll tell Honey the situation is critical," Gogo assured.

"Don't tell her about Fred."

GoGo stopped where she stood and took a deep breath before hanging up and continuing uphill. She figured Honey went to the laboratory one hour after she hadn't answered GoGo's texts. If there was anywhere Honey probably wanted to be after a successful run with some new technology and formulas, it was the nerd lab. God knew if she even knew about Fred's death. Was it too soon to tell someone? It felt wrong not to do something correctly like when Tadashi died. Funerals. Investigations. But that was so much more public than Fred's death and, with the public eye viewing Big Hero 6 in a completely different light from the day of the Kreitech incident, she wasn't sure if she wanted Fred's death to be anything other than what it was.

A sad thing that nobody should have ever seen.

This early in the morning, nobody was quite awake yet. The lab lights were on, though and, thus, GoGo knew Honey was inside, probably making tweaks to aiming mechanisms on the gun she saw in the news report or mixing new chemicals together to make new weapons. The girl enjoyed herself as much as Fred did but she didn't do it just for the fulfillment of a fantasy. She did it for science. Plain and simple.

Stepping into the lab, GoGo decided against telling Honey about Fred. There was an unspoken thing between them. A dorky guy who loved monsters and a nerd girl who got a kick out of chemical reactions didn't seem like a pair made for each other and, yet, GoGo hadn't seen a day at the college that Fred wasn't always making Honey laugh with his goofball antics and Honey wasn't making grand foam explosions to please Fred's dream of becoming a monster from one of his favorite movies. It didn't look like much from the outside but GoGo could see how it felt for them. She couldn't tell Honey about Fred. She couldn't do it to the poor girl.

"Honey?" GoGo called into the lab as she walked, looking around and finding experiments she'd never seen. It had been quite some time since she had been to the nerd college, after adopting heroics as a hobby-job. She was into the whole thing to try and make something so thrilling it might entertain her. Then, after Kreitech, she found out that particular something was high strung action of the cityscape battlefield. GoGo stood in front of one of the inventions which, from her perspective, appeared to just be a massive pole. Perhaps it was better she didn't return often. "Honey!"

GoGo went to Honey's corner and found it full of beakers, phials, whiteboards and computers, all signs of Honey's presence but no actual Honey. GoGo narrowed her eyes at the computer screen which displayed a small window at the top of the monitor. In the tiny box was GoGo, standing in Honey's corner, looking directly at the computer. Honey had left the video diary program open before she had left. GoGo approached it and reached for the screen to tap the 'X' at the corner of the window before stopping where she stood and peering at the little light beside the camera lens on the monitor's frame.

_It was still recording._

GoGo furrowed her brow and moved her finger towards the timeline of the video, watching the five minute mark approach and tick over with the seconds that passed. She tapped the skip back button and immediately pressed play to watch the diary from what, certainly, had to be moments before she entered the building.

Honey stepped away from the monitor and held a bubble in her hand, bright yellow like her hair. She cleared her throat and held it out to the camera with a valiant voice as she spoke.

"Tahdah!" Her accent came through in her exclamation. "I bring to you, the first safety bulb capable of sustaining copious amounts of electron kinetic energy! The chemical imbalances within the formula allow you to coat an electrical source and contain the flow of electricity within by stopping it entirely! Like a dam for watts instead of water!"

She giggled at her own joke.

"Basically, the carbon that I put in here keeps covalent bonds with- Oh!" She flinched and a silent pop of foam burst from the bubble, rupturing the whole thing and sending a semi-solid goop that looked like arts and crafts glue all over Honey's right side. She started muttering to herself and trying to wipe the stuff away from her skin but it only managed to stick between the places she touched herself, even making the lab coat stick to the poorly shrouded pink battle armor she wore underneath, probably hot off the fire on Minami. She stormed off and GoGo looked up to the emergency flush center.

There was no water on the ground so she didn't go there. She also wasn't in much of a hurry so she may not have tried to scrub her skin in the emergency shower. GoGo looked at the video of her coming in, almost three minutes later, and staring at the camera. She stopped the video diary and closed it, looking at the floor and finding small drops of residue left over from the thin membrane of the bulb that must have deteriorated and fallen off behind her.

GoGo followed the trail around the corner. First was Honey's shoes on the floor. Then her coat. Then, even her pink suit lay on the floor, covered in the sticky concoction she had made on the video. GoGo hooked a hard left and her eyes widened in shock.

Honey Lemon laid sprawled out on the floor, her own sticky electric glue binding her to the ground as she stretched outwards, desperately crawling yet making hardly any headway. She was nude, sweaty, and trembling. GoGo shouted her name and Honey didn't seem to react. A small puddle of the glue, sweat, and whatever other fluids that coated Honey collected at her knees where they touched the floor and her face appeared to actively ooze translucent mucus.

GoGo reached out a hand to touch Honey's forehead and, suddenly, Honey jerked. Her head thrashed backwards violently and her whole spine contorted with enough force to rip the plaster-like binds from the floor and rolling her over entirely. GoGo sprung backwards and flattened herself against the wall, afraid and unsure of what to do. Honey's smaller than average breasts were coated in the mucus that dribbled down her face, her nipples outright as her legs quivered. She was dripping from her nether, what was possibly urine or something else. Honey's voice escaped in little whispers and squeaks as her body tensed, her eyes, now visible, were wide and tearing behind broken glasses.

In a moment, Honey's whole body screeched and wretched, her eyes rolling back in her head as grey tendrils flushed out of every opening in her anatomy, pulling her throat as it poured out of her mouth and rolling her eyes back in her head as it wormed about three inches out of her nostrils. Her ears ruptured and tiny trickles of blood seeped onto the tile floor beside her head. Two more forced their way out of her underside, one dangerously gnashing from her ass as another vehemently whipped about from her vagina. More blood started mixing with the puddle.

"Oh fuck!" GoGo barked at the recognition of the creature, snagging a discus from her backpack and rearing it back to attack before hesitating. Jesus Christ. Where the hell was she supposed to hit that wouldn't hurt Honey in the process? She darted to Honey's mouth and grabbed the creature that wormed over her tongue. Carefully, GoGo aimed the blade of her disc at the base of the worm weave and sliced. They wriggled in GoGo's fingers and GoGo threw them away from Honey before they could regroup with the greater mass like last time.

GoGo grappled at the worms spewing from Honey's crotch and looked down to see Honey's entire abdomen writhing and distorting. The once skinny and appropriate figure Honey had was being warped, tugging against her skin like it was going to rip and apparently breaking Honey's bones. GoGo turned her attention back to Honey's groin only to see the worms in her anus and her crevice had morphed together, end to end, and pulled themselves tight against Honey's body. Reacting as fast as she could, GoGo returned to Honey's mouth and watched worms start to peel their way out from behind her eyeballs. Muffled screams filled the room. GoGo raised the blade to cut the worms again but flinched when the worms in her nose found the worms in her mouth, connecting their transparent fluid membranes and lashing together.

Almost as soon as it happened, electric bolts burst through Honey's eyes and reached weakly upwards towards GoGo. Instinctually, she backed off of Honey's body and crawled close to the wall, witnessing what was to happen next. Honey's body shook like an earthquake and bolts of electricity ripped through the skin on her arms, her abdomen, and her thighs. Each left horrid scorch marks and burning flesh before her whole body seized and thrust away from the floor, Honey's legs hyperextending and forcing her hips up to GoGo's desperately helpless eyes.

Honey's screams became hoarse and guttural as fluids poured out of her wet slit. GoGo watched her friend extend until the muscles tore the bones in her shins as the creature that buried itself in her sex pulled free, extracting the extensions that stretched out of her eardrums and eyeballs to make a strand long enough to connect the worm weave that poured from her face to the one that stretched her asshole. The moaning wails turned into shrill shrieks when the two connected and GoGo covered her ears and screamed in terror.

But covering her ears didn't stop GoGo from hearing the concussive explosion and the cessation of all noise except for her own from there on. GoGo's scream ran out of air and she huffed massive breaths of air that aided her little in calming down. Her wide eyes couldn't comprehend the horrors she saw as Honey's headless body lay limp on the floor with a line of woven worms looped through her asshole and out a blood covered, fleshy hole in her neck. Thick blood splatters covered the floor where Honey's panicked face once was and her body remained still.

Temporarily.

Slowly the creature inside Honey started to move again, disconnecting and erecting itself. The end that reached upwards from Honey's neck dragged Honey's body with it, forcing her naked form to hover in the air, impaled on the worms within. Blood from her neck started to pour evenly down her chest and off her perky breasts. The worm started to move its lower half and let Honey's body gently slide down the monster's slender impalement until her feet touched the floor. Her weight brought her back to her knees and the worms crawled along the ceiling of the lab and away from GoGo, bending Honey's body back in a lewd display of her goodness wasted.

The creature scurried away and, in front of Honey's dripping wet, bleeding corpse, GoGo cried.


	7. Chapter 7

Wasabi held tightly to GoGo's hand as they stood outside the college campus, behind a tied yellow tape border that isolated the horrific incident. The images were still fresh in GoGo's mind, flashing on the backs of her eyelids as if the bolts of electricity that surged from Honey's thrashing body had burned into GoGo's eyes just as unforgettably as her screams rang in her ears. Her grip tightened on Wasabi's hand, refusing to let him go at the risk of losing her cool in the public.

Hiro stood on GoGo's other side, clutching Baymax underneath his arm. This was all becoming too much. In less than a year, they all had lost so much and, in the back of Hiro's mind, he was certain that there was more to come if they didn't push their emotions aside to address the problem. Looking at GoGo's suppressed anguish and fear, Hiro also knew it would be impossible to do that.

Professor Hikari came out from the front doors of the lab with a briefcase in tow, taking a deep breath at the top of the steps before reporters started asking their questions. He was only just assigned to replaced Callaghan when his heinous act of public treachery thrust the people of San Fransokyo into a fearful state of mind about the experimental technologies that came out of the university. If he went under for this, he'd never come back up.

He took each step slowly and carefully, swallowing down the saddened words he had to try and make as legally acceptable as possible. The podium was already set up for him. Microphones installed and everything. He set the briefcase on the ground as he took the podium in two hands, the rambling reporters finally drowning out the worrisome thoughts in his own mind. He held his hands up as a soundless request for silence. Silence never came.

"At around five in the morning, today, August twentieth, a student, who shall remain nameless to protect the identity of their friends and families, appears to have been raped and fatally electrocuted while in the laboratory." Camera flashes caught his broken face and reporters demanded to know what he meant by 'electrocuted'. In the context of the situation, he wasn't sure, himself. The body showed so many signs that replicated that of people struck with lightning or children who got electrocuted by grounded outlets. But…

"No further comment will be made on the matter," his voice trembled as he spoke, "as the police have requested, due to the nature of the crime." He turned and attempted to plow through the crowd of cameras that swarmed him on the way to the parking lot. He stopped and looked at Wasabi and GoGo with a passing glance before rushing to his car and shutting himself in alone with the luggage.

Wasabi held GoGo's hand tightly in his and Hiro placed a hand at the small of her back in comfort, helping Wasabi lead him to his car to drive her home. It was silent nearly the whole time, aside from GoGo's lonely sniffles. She fought off efforts to help her get out of the car, storming into her apartment complex without a word. Wasabi and Hiro let themselves into her studio apartment after she had plowed through the door as if it was a dumbfound bystander who got in her way. Looking up the stairs to the upper deck, Hiro could see her dresser tipped over and laying on the floor, clothes strewn about.

Wasabi sat on the couch and buried his face in his large hands. Hiro set Baymax down in the corner and activated him, his big inflatable body filling the case and sliding the mechanical armor where it was intended to. He looked down awkwardly and waved his hand in a perfect circle beside himself. "Hello," his voice emitted.

"Deactivate hard hull," Hiro commanded and Baymax's armor separated at the front, down a long line of clasps and latches that came together to form the illusion of a handle and lock on the suitcase when it was closed. Baymax's more familiar bulbous form stepped free from the metal exoskeleton. He was in full nurse mode. "Go upstairs and scan GoGo for chemical or hormonal imbalances. Cheer her up, you know? Like you cheer me up?"

"I can hear you, asshole," GoGo called apathetically from upstairs. Hiro winced and looked at Baymax, nodding to follow through.

Baymax carefully maneuvered the terrain for his body, cautiously sidestepping around the coffee table at the center of the room and ensuring to take each step one at a time with an almost mathematic precision. He got up to the upper level of the studio and a faint sound from within him signified that he was scanning GoGo as she lay on the bed.

"Scan complete," Baymax announced. Hiro watched from below as, suddenly, a large, fast pillow flung towards Baymax's head with expert aim, knocking him off balance and sending him bouncing down the stairway on his inflatable backside. When he came to a squeak of a stop at the bottom of the stairs, he looked to Hiro and held a finger into the air. "Diagnosis: neurotransmitter imbalance. Miss Tomago has a lack of dopamine and serotonin."

"Baymax, we know what's wrong," Wasabi muttered. "She's sad about Honey being gone, man. We were trying to see if you could find a way to fix her."

Baymax looked at him for a long time before looking up at GoGo again. He stood and cornered himself, flickering the screen on his chest and standing still before announcing. "Viary program engaged."

At the sound of the word "Viary", Wasabi stood and his eyes widened. Viary was the name of program installed on all the computers at the nerd lab, specifically used there for recording progress on experiments at the college. Tadashi kept one on Baymax's construction. GoGo kept one for her electromagnetic, zero resistance wheels. Even Fred kept one about his made up nicknames for the new freshmen. Surely, Honey kept one just as well and, since Baymax had the file cloud password from Tadashi, he could access all of the videos they submitted.

Honey's image flickered onto the screen as she backed away from her computer at the lab, grinning and obviously hiding something behind her back. She pulled it out to reveal that it was the chrome polished, bubble spewing gun she used in the footage of the fire on South Minami, only in some prototype stage where there was no glass bulb in the hilt and less chrome plating.

"This is the test model of the Bubble Wand!" She leaned in and wagged a finger at the camera with a grin. "Patent pending."

Hiro and Wasabi stood on the stairs, leaning against the rails as they watched Honey bounce back to her original spot to talk about the features of the device.

"The Bubble Wand is supposed to be utilized for the rapid distribution of safety balls." She revealed in her purse a big pile of orbs of pale colors. "The balls can be used around the house to stop fires, block out floods, and so much more if you put your mind to use!"

Fred stepped into the shot behind her and remarked coolly, "You can do anything if you put your mind to use."

"Exactly, Freddie!" Honey beamed.

"Like buy a fire extinguisher," he deadpanned.

She plugged the bag into the gun and aimed at Fred who put his hands up in mock shock. When Honey pulled the trigger, the gun made a terrible grinding noise. Immediately, Fred took the gun from Honey's hands and pushed her away, crouching with the gun and covering it with his whole body before, suddenly, the gun burst into a ball of yellow foam that nearly encompassed his body.

"Freddie!" Honey exclaimed in worry, immediately digging at the foam and pulling it away from him in scoops. It appeared to have the same consistency as sand with the solidity of concrete. Fred looked up and glanced about at the parts of his body that weren't visible behind the sand concoction. "Fred, are you okay? Are you hurt?"

"Nah," Fred laughed, "Just covered in sand, man!"

Wasabi and Hiro chuckled lightly to themselves as they watched the video, Honey frantically scraping layer upon layer of frozen sand from Fred's body until he was able to move again. He sprung upwards and revealed that the gun's butt had burst open like a rifle barrel in old cartoons. He handed it back to Honey and shrugged.

"Maybe you should put some, like, pressure equalizing dome under there?" He suggested. Wasabi was taken aback. It was the most intelligent sounding thing that Fred had said out loud. He was friends with the science geeks but, certainly, he didn't have much intellect to him to speak of. He walked out of the frame, sand still falling where it clumped together on his clothes. "I'm gonna have sand to pick out of my ass for days!"

Wasabi and Hiro laughed again, this time hearing a third laugh from behind them. Hiro looked over his shoulder to see GoGo standing at the top of the steps, holding loosely onto the handrail and watching the videos as tears ran down her softly smiling face. Honey reached towards the camera and turned it off, the shot flickering to a new diary entry, presumably later as Honey had the very pressure equalizing bulb that GoGo saw in the news report and the very same one that Fred talked to her about.

"Fred is making a lot of progress," she whispered into the camera, looking over her shoulder as Fred worked on the pole that GoGo recalled seeing in the lab moments before Honey's event. Naturally. He would make a pole as a science project. "Ever since we all broke up, he's been working really hard to keep up with me in terms of advancing what we have for ourselves. He's working on… Fred?" She turned and called to him, "What are you working on?"

"Now?" Fred asked, flicking the protective facemask he wore over his eyes and pointing at the pole with finger-guns. "I'm making a stick! Check it out!"

Honey shook her head with a chuckle and returned to the camera. "Kidding as ever, but he really is doing something. He's been taking a lot of the science fiction movie stuff he watches so much and applying it to the real world. He's mastering his own suit and making it fun and safe for others."

She looked directly at the camera and the three viewers became silent.

"Wasabi," she whispered, "I think your words got through to him. I think he didn't want to be the bad Godzilla that destroyed San Fransokyo. I think he wanted to be the good Godzilla that fought the monsters that tried to destroy San Fransokyo."

Wasabi blinked for a moment. He almost forgot that anyone could look at anybody's Viaries. It was meant to be able to exchange ideas with classmates who had home projects or who weren't present at the lab at the time. Kind of like a video forum of educational science-y nerdiness. Wasabi looked up to GoGo who looked back at him. How long had it been since they were in the lab? Since they even glanced at their Viary homepage? Where he had given up on his friends, his friends never gave up on their friendship. Fred even appeared to be working towards repairing it for the greater good.

The video clipped again and GoGo recognized the frames immediately. "Baymax, stop."

Baymax took the order and paused the video, shutting the program and looking straight ahead at her. Hiro and Wasabi followed his robotic stare up the stairs to her. She looked at the floor and gulped.

"Sorry," she breathed, "that's just… that's the last video. I've seen it and…"

Wasabi nodded.

She knew how it ended.

Hiro looked to Wasabi. "Why was Honey talking to you through her video diary? Isn't that supposed to be private stuff?"

"Viary was installed because it was the only program that let several people have one video diary to share," Wasabi explained, cupping a hand around his chin. "It let us communicate about projects we were working on to students who didn't have the same class as us or who were working on stuff on their own, outside of school, you know?"

"Any one of us could access it," GoGo continued, "and watch the vlogs anyone in the class did. For a while, it was like our message system. Lord knows I watched a mushy video meant for someone who I'm pretty sure wasn't me."

Hiro looked back at Baymax and touched the silicone casing of his chest. Baymax looked down and automatically registered his heartbeat through the capillaries in his fingertips. It was increasing.

"If we can access Honey's Viary," he looked up to Wasabi and GoGo.

Together, their eyes widened and they looked to each other.

"Then we can access Fred's!"


	8. Chapter 8

The three of them sat, still and focused, on GoGo's couch, staring intently at Baymax's screen. A frozen image of Fred's ecstatic face in front of the camera displayed, waiting to start. Hiro was uneasy. He knew GoGo and Wasabi were, too. So soon after his death came Honey's and, now, so soon after the mystery began, they stood before what could be an opportunity to find out what could have possibly caused the incidents. What created the nightmare that bore into GoGo's eyes? What crept underneath Wasabi's skin? What worms crawled from the ground under Hiro's feet? All of it might be explained if Fred knew what he was going into before he died.

"Are you ready?" Hiro asked the two of them after almost an hour of mental preparation.

"Yeah," Wasabi said softly. GoGo simply nodded.

"Baymax," Hiro took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. "Play Fred's Viary."

The video instantly began with Fred waving his hands in front of the camera with an enormous grin. He bounced out of the frame and came back with blueprints that he had doodled all over, white pencil displaying a tube like structure with a flat ball on top surrounded by monsters and stick figures. He pointed at the diagram to isolate what he was talking about.

"Remember in the UnderTown, how the monster would just turn off everything in the mine shafts by planting its little alien babies in the ground above it and their electromagnetic connection with each other would interfere with the lights?" Fred recalled it as if he was talking to them and not to a camera. It made Wasabi hurt more inside to hear it. "Well, you can totally do that with stuff! Take an old metal slinky toy and run electricity through it with some battery wires and you can make an electron interference tunnel! I used to break my dad's watches by dropping them through it and ruining the current inside."

He laughed. GoGo missed that laugh.

"I've been thinking about the Phantom and how Callaghan could only use the nanobots you made, Hiro, with the brainwave signal device in his mask and I thought, well, like, everything runs on watch batteries, right? So I'm going to make little electromagnetic babies for my costume!"

The three remained utterly silent even as Fred waved goodbye to the camera and the next video started up. This time, it was weeks later. The pole he was working on in Honey's videos was complete with a small ball of spinning grey fluid inside. He stood from the desk and smiled goofily. "I should have shown you guys the worms I found last week! I thought, like, for certain that San Fransokyo pest control would be all up on that but my dad's house is littered with them!"

He jumped off screen and came back with two metal balls attached to a single rod. "I've been shocking them with the therapeutic rod to forcefully adapt them to conduct electricity. Like the hyperactive evolution in the new Lizard King movie! That one wasn't the best, though." He clicked the button on the rod and a small stream of electric current flickered between the two bulbs. He put the welding mask on his face and raised the node to the ball, jolting it for a moment and watching as the top of the pole shook a little. The fluid inside started to resemble the worms GoGo had seen before, and her breath caught in her chest.

The third video was different from the others.

Fred was already in his costume, the head lifted off so the camera could see his face. He didn't look so goofy or happy as in the other vlogs. His brows pinched at the middle of his forehead and he remained almost as still as the three viewers were. Honey could be heard in the background, making the same priming noises for the gun that they had heard in her Viary.

"I fucked up, Wasabi…" he swallowed and looked pleadingly into the camera. "The, uh, pole I made for Tess had a low level magnetic field to keep Tess on it so she couldn't escape but…" he ran a hand down his face. "After some experiments gone wrong, she got bigger and stronger and now I can't stop her. She's capable of some dangerous shit, guys. I fucked up really bad."

He looked over his shoulder at Honey and, then, back at the camera.

"Me and Honey are going to take care of it and, I swear to God, that'll be the last of it," Fred shook his head. "Wasabi, man, I am so sorry. I promise, this will be the last time I fuck up. We've planted a weak electromagnetic pulse in the High Time apartments on South Minami and it's headed there now. We're gonna kill the worms and make sure nobody gets hurt in the process. That'll be the end of it."

He turned his head as Honey called to him and together, they darted out of the nerd lab. After about a half hour, the camera automatically shut off and left Baymax standing before three patients with accelerated heart rates.

Hiro sat back and put his hands over his mouth in stunned shock. Wasabi covered his eyes with his palm and GoGo took deep, heavy breaths through her nose. In utter silence, the three of them processed just what new knowledge they had all acquired. It was Fred, after all. Or, rather, not him but something he made in order to perfect his suit's abilities. He and Honey set the apartment complex on fire to kill it and it found Fred and killed him, found Honey and killed her. It was like the plotline of one of Fred's movies.

"We have to stop it," GoGo stood and crossed her arms over her chest. "We owe it to Honey and Fred and it's our responsibility to make sure that thing doesn't hurt anyone else."

"But how?" Wasabi looked up. His eyes were red and it was audible that he was attempting to fight the cracks in his voice. "You said so yourself, you can't cut that damn thing. Fred said it has some electromagnetic bond to itself."

"That's just it, though," GoGo grabbed a pack of gum and flipped it over in her hand, "if it's electromagnetics that keep it together, it's going to keep coming after me. It wanted my discs so it'll find me easiest. We lure it somewhere, capture it, and get rid of it."

Wasabi stood and barked across the table. "I'm not losing any more of my friends! There has to be some way to kill it, dammit!"

Hiro looked up from his feet. "You're both right."

The two stopped fighting with each other and turned to him.

"We're going to lure it, capture it, and get rid of it," Hiro nodded as plans spiraled in his head. "And we're not going to lose any more friends."

Wasabi looked at GoGo and put his hands on his hips, the way GoGo did sometimes when she wanted to know the answer to some loophole in the group's attack plan. GoGo started towards putting her hands on her hips as well but stopped at the sight of Wasabi's mirroring her, deciding instead to play cool and tuck her hands behind her back as she blew a bubble with her gum.

"So how are we supposed to do this?" Wasabi asked.

Hiro thought back to the days after Tadashi's death, when the Phantom first attacked him and he mindlessly attempted to trace Callaghan. Baymax stopped him from nearly falling off of the boardwalk and into the water below just because he was so hell-bent upon finding out where the nanobots were trying to reconnect. He stood and nodded.

"The docks."


	9. Chapter 9

There was utter silence on the south-side docks of San Fransokyo, where three friends intent on stopping a bioelectric weapon with a dolly full of electromagnetic discs tucked away in a boat. The plan was to draw the worms into the lower deck and, once it was in there, cut holes in the hull and sink the boat with it inside. Hiro kept Baymax floating in the water on one side of the boat while Wasabi hid near a storage crate on the dock, waiting to sweep in once the worms took the bait. GoGo.

Wasabi peeked around the corner and tapped on the metal for Hiro to hear. GoGo was coming down the street, fast, a blurry grey blob following behind her and short circuiting the streetlights as it passed. Just as Wasabi feared from Fred's videos, Tess was getting stronger. But GoGo was still faster than it and that's all that they needed to get ahead of it. Wasabi watched GoGo speed towards the dock on her discs as he hammered the metal container he hid behind.

GoGo leaped and curled her legs underneath her, throwing her weight into a front flip over the edge of the dock. She nearly completely finished her flip when she passed over the boat and Baymax's soft body caught her. She looked up to Hiro and he smiled at the success of the first phase of the plan. He grabbed Tomago's hand and pulled her onto Baymax's back with him.

Wasabi watched as the grey blob pounded against the side of the boat, a gentle rock slowing its momentum as it scurried inside with a noise like metal raking against metal. It made his skin cringe. He waited a minute, giving the creature time to explore the boat and discover the bait naturally enough that it couldn't escape once it was sinking.

"Go," Wasabi nodded and Hiro locked his hands into Baymax's back, pushing forward his armor covered arms and holding the boat steady as Wasabi turned on his plasma blades and punctured the steel exterior. A shrill noise as metal rapidly melted and steam arose from the boat. The boat started to wobble and, as Baymax let go of the side, started to sink all on its own. Hiro's breath caught. Christ. It was going to work.

"Fuck!" Wasabi shouted and Hiro's smile dropped dead. Immediately, he brought Baymax around the boat, using the wings as paddles at his sides. Before Baymax even made it to the edge of the dock, Hiro and GoGo jumped off of his back to get to Wasabi as fast as they could.

As fast as they could wasn't fast enough.

A fluid rod of the worms shot outward from the hole in the side of the boat, impaling Wasabi's shoulder and wrapping around his body wildly. GoGo gripped a disc on her forearm and threw it at the worms, slicing through it and dropping Wasabi from the edge of the dock and into the water. He started screaming in agony and GoGo sprung towards him, reaching a hand out to pull him out of the water but Hiro grabbed her and yanked her away from the edge.

"What the fuck is wrong with you!?" GoGo barked, slapping Hiro with the back of her hand to force him to let go.

Hiro recoiled and grabbed at GoGo's waist to stop her from going any further. "The worms' made their connection! The water is conducting the electricity! You can't touch him!"

GoGo breathed heavily, a panic overwhelming her and forcing her to dart to the boat. She grabbed ropes and threw them into the water for Wasabi to grab onto.

"Wasabi!" She cried. "Grab onto the rope! Please! We can pull you out of there!"

Wasabi stared straight at her with wide eyes. His whole body was tensed, even his jaw was clamped tight, baring his teeth, bloody from biting through his tongue. He slowly started sinking, bubbles popping as the air in his lungs left between the gaps in his teeth, slowly being replaced by water. Fish started to float upwards from the water and rest on the surface. GoGo's eyes pleaded with what she saw but nothing could change what had happened.

Wasabi was dead.

The rest of the worms lunged from within the boat, pouring onto the dock and rearing for Baymax as he awkwardly climbed out of the water. Hiro rolled out of the way as another lengthy extension of the creature spiraled out and punctured through Baymax's exposed torso. Of all the days to remove any part of his armor. Quickly, he started deflating. Hiro ran to his protector and slid to the microchip ports on his chest. He tapped the ring and the port opened. Two chips were in Baymax at the time: the combat chip that Hiro had made to turn Baymax into a fighting machine and the chip simply labeled _Tadashi Hamada_.

"I'm satisfied with my care!" Hiro shouted as he plucked the green _Tadashi_ chip and held it tightly in his hand. Looking up to the worm's lance, he flinched to the sight of GoGo's disc slicing through it again. She caught the disc as it bounced back to her and leaped at the worm, roaring in a fury Hiro had never seen from her before. Another disc cut Baymax's deactivated body from the worms. GoGo jumped gymnastically onto the dock, catching the disc in her other hand and preparing to throw her weapons yet again.

"I hate you!" She barked at Tess and the creature averted its attention to her and her discs. She spun out of the way of a thin strike and rolled forward to avoid a second before flinging the disc again and bouncing it off of the stack of storage units, slicing into the beast on the way back to her hand. Her eyes widened at the units and she looked to Hiro. "The crates! Trap it in the crates!"

Hiro's eyes left hers and moved frantically to find an opportunity begging to be taken. Adrenaline pumping in his veins started the sprint towards the crate that he had told Wasabi to hide behind when the plan was to lie in waiting. The new plan was to stop this monstrosity from killing any more of his friends. It had taken three people from him. One was too many.

He mapped out the whole thing in his head. He'd open the double doors on both sides so that half of it was open and the rest was shut. Once GoGo had gone through it, he would shut his side on Tess. GoGo would shut the door behind her to make sure it didn't get out. It would work. It had to. It was all they had, now.

GoGo performed a backflip off of the management building façade, forcing the sack of worms to crash into the structure before turning around and continuing its heated chase with her. She saw Hiro doing his work on the cargo crate and immediately started to line herself up to loop around and into it. She would be the bait this time, since the damn thing seemed to enjoy fucking up her life so much. It would be hell before she dare let anything happen to Tadashi's little brother. She was going to make up for the deaths of her closest friends by saving his life along with all the people of San Fransokyo who had no idea what Tess even existed.

She slipped on the wet concrete and reacted as rapidly as she could, placing one of her forearm discs on the ground to slide along her calf and cut a wide arch with her speed to thread herself through the figurative needle's eye of the storage unit's door. She rocked herself back onto the blades of her roller discs and charged for the target, watching Hiro on the door.

In a blink, she zipped through the door and, in the next instance, the creature followed hotly behind. She scraped to a stop and slammed the door shut on her end, hearing a subsequent slam as the momentum of the magnetic monster mashed against the inside of the door, fighting to get through it. Hiro locked his side and quickly rounded the container to check up on his friend.

GoGo held her head low as she panted, holding the door with her whole weight. She looked up at him with a soft smile. He sighed and sat down, tears already flowing from his face. Finally, they could report the damn thing or just toss it. The latter really tempted him. Just fucking throw it into the ocean and never, ever, have to worry about it again. Mourn their friends. Stay together. Understand each other better. Be finished with the responsibility of being a hero or, if they chose to do so, keep up this hectic, dangerous life. For the first time in what felt like a long time, despite being two days, Hiro felt like they were back in control of their lives.

GoGo's eyes widened and she fell to the ground, gripping her leg. Hiro jumped back. The worms had made it part-way through the door just as GoGo was closing it and had a hard hold of the discus there. She looked up to Hiro in utter fright and Hiro's heart rate peaked again. He grabbed at GoGo's hands and pulled her as hard as he could, finding little grip under his boots and heavy resistance to her freedom. GoGo started grunting as the worms couldn't extend outward from the doors, nor drag her through the pinched sliver of a gap between them. It was going to compromise and break her whole body to get her in there, starting with her leg. And Tess wasn't going to stop there, apparent from the worms that started to crawl up her arms.

Hiro looked at the _Tadashi_ chip in his hand and kneeled to GoGo, pulling at the flexible fabric between the metal plated armor she wore and using the sharper corner of the chip to puncture the weave. He cut along her neck line, the largest opening in the armor between her shoulders. She wriggled under the worms' grapple on her and looked up to Hiro in fearful confusion. Hiro wormed his fingers under her suit, the leather tipped fingers of his gloves on her sweating skin.

"Remember what Fred said at Kreitech?" Hiro heaved. "_It's a suit_."

GoGo's eyes widened and she grinned, biting her lip and writhing her fingers free from the metal plated gloves' internal grip. First out was her left arm and she used it to pull her right arm free from the suit. She wrestled her torso out of the suit and slipped out of the electromagnetic disc skates like they were loose shoes. Her hips and ass took some work to get out of the hole intended for her neck's mobility but, once they were free, Hiro was able to pull GoGo out of her power suit.

Sweating, she adjusted her bra strap to keep what little clothes she wore underneath the suit on her body in the vaguely chilly night air. The two of them breathed heavily and stared at Tess as it struggled to bring the electromagnetic discs on GoGo's suit into the crate with it. Clangs of metal on metal echoed off the water with each attempt to pull the suit past the doors and, soon, a sad sounding screech whimpered from within.

Hiro blinked for a minute. He understood what it was, now. Why the worms didn't take the bait in the boat once Wasabi punctured it. Why Honey was attacked in the lab. Why Fred couldn't keep it contained in the beginning of everything.

Tess was a glutton.

A glutton who got used to the electric energy that Fred fed it and went out in search for more. It killed Fred for the electromagnetic current he held just from his overexposure to the magnetic pole he had created to contain it. It killed Honey because of the electron absorbing foam that stuck onto her. Then, when it had a bowl of electromagnetic discs to itself and Wasabi interrupted, it was certain it could attain even more.

And now, it was trapped in the dark, food in its grasp, and completely incapable of absorbing it - of becoming one with its electromagnetic energy.

Hiro took GoGo's hand and lead her away from the scene, keeping in the shadows to make sure she didn't feel too exposed in this public situation. Based on GoGo's exhaustion, Hiro could tell she didn't seem to care who saw her, so long as she got far away from the docks to finally have her moment about Wasabi just as she had about Honey and Fred. Hiro supported her with his shoulder and, for the first time, they felt like a single entity, alone in the dark. Not Big Hero 6 but, rather, something completely different, more functional and healthy, tried and true.

Alone.

But whole.

As one.


	10. Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading this, guys. My first story on was kind of a step for me since I usually never publish the things I write. I thought I should say a couple of words about the story after the fact and talk about projects for the future in case anyone wants to follow my works more.

When I went to see Big Hero 6, I knew it was a comic first and I knew that it was dramatically different from the contents of the children's adaptation. However, I absolutely adored the characters of the film and their whimsical diversity. I also delighted in forgetting, at times, that the film was intended for children. There were a million concepts I had in mind, just sitting in the theater, that made me cringe at the way it would work out. I saw a children's movie and came out with ideas about how to make the film grittier and more disturbingly accurate to the dangers of unexperimented technologies that was the overarching theme of the film.

And so Tess was born.

Something else I had to do, for my own sick pleasure, was kill the characters I liked the most. A kind of catharsis was the reward for the gory descriptions of horrid demises for the characters and, sad to say, there were so many more that I wanted to kill for that same catharsis.

However, if there was one thing I wanted to do above all, it was reduce the story in my head from the thirteen chapters it was going to be to be ten chapters at a maximum. Several sequences in the story allude to the fact that there was more going on behind the primary story of ALONE 1, including the new professor that replaces Callaghan knowing some details about the unregulated growth of Tess as well as the public opinion of Big Hero 6 as a vigilante group.

There will probably be a follow-up lemon or two (an unofficial epilogue piece or three) just to supplement the lemons I avoided writing for the sake of chapter length.

In the future, I want to work on a Spider-Man OC in a story called "Blackwall" which will be more detailed in all aspects and less limited as far as chapter length or number. I also want to publish a story based on the game The Binding of Isaac that explains where the other playable characters (like Eve, Judas, etc.) come from within the context of the game's story; again, it will be just as juicy and rotten. I will announce other projects in future author's notes.

Thank you again for reading!

-Charlie


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